Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
PROPHETS OF DOOM PROFIT FROM DOOM
Prophets of Doom Profit from Doom
Doomsayers dominate headlines because, too often, they profit from the prospect of doom through fear.
They earn profits from doom, these prophets of doom. Take away the profits, away go those prophets.
In America, black people not only survived their black African enslavers' brutality, but they also survived their white captors' death-defying Middle Passage. They survived centuries of enslavement; a war of self-liberation dissembled as a "Civil War." They survived a bloody post-war abnegation, as well as the asserverations of a series of white "scientific" prophets of doom, who learnedly predicted the blacks' imminent extinction, who profited from doomsaying handsomely.
These doomsayers are black and white; liberal and conservative; male and female; "learned" and ignorant; young and old; Christian, Muslim, agnostic, and other.
We are still here, despite them all!
Surely, another power is in play here. Surely, a society whose rancid racism massacred the Indians and the bison; that inspired the rise and triumph the racist paradigms of the Afrikaans, the Nazis, the Japanese, and Mussolini's fascists have been subject to that power from its start.
That power thwarted the plans to colonize, outside the United States of America, those "troublesome" free blacks whose mere existence routed the racist rubric in Presidents ranging from Jefferson to Lincoln. That power thwarted the Jim Crow machinations of Presidents ranging from Andrew Johnson through Woodrow Wilson; and capitalized upon and exploited the slivers of opportunity offered by Presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Eisenhower for that much heralded, seldom-seen, equality of opportunity in every social or economic sector.
Before this "power" every knee must bow, and every tongue must confess, that the Earth is The Lord's and the fullness and the powers thereof, the world and they that dwell therein!
Doomsayers, the darkness is always succeeded by the light, as the dawn always follows the night. So scram!